Friday, July 30, 2010

Wondering which Harvard grads got their wedding announcement into the NYT this week, while your best friend from Northeastern never even got his calls returned by the social editor?

Interested in how many people you know got hitched last Sunday at a country barn in Greenwich, Connecticut, while you were stuck barbequing in your parents' backyard in South Brunswick?

Curious how many brides and grooms out there currently collect seven-figure bonuses at Goldman Sachs, while you continue to write an anonymous, non-paying media blog?

Or, simply put, do you have way too much time on your hands?

Yesterday, a new website, www.weddingcredential.com, quietly launched to solve all your problems. Its sophisticated (in all ways) search engine can take words like "Princeton" or "St. Alban's" and deliver you a list of every alumnus whose wedding or engagement made its way past the status police, and into the NYT.

Who's responsible? No idea. Its creators have registered the site anonymously.

The site's homepage reports some preliminary statistics culled from what appears to be several years worth of announcements,: 1028 mentioned rabbis, 466 included a Harvard reference, and 1566 said something about being a "director."

There are even 75 (of 3911 currently in the database) that reference the NYT itself -- nearly 2 percent of the total. We spotted sportswriter Juliet Macur and metro reporters Christine Haughney and William Rashbaum in the mix. Belated congrats to our boldface pals.

And best wishes to everyone who is now going to lose ten minutes of their life to checking their alma maters, employers and job titles. We're already done for the day.

18 comments:

Anonymous
said...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/akdobbins/wedding-credential

<<Finally, a way to search the NYT wedding announcements based on your favorite colleges or companies. You can also find out stuff like how many women keep their names (15%) or quit their jobs (.13%). Whatever you're looking for (within the realm of NYT weddings)! This is the project of our intern Sam Gerstenzang, and he's the coolest.

What the F8ck is with the clearly anti-semetic references in the site's headline posts? Why do they need to mention how many references there are to rabbi? This is some dark allusion to Jewish consipiracy shit.

"Nytpickerusuck" needs to get an irony injection and realize how funny / gross the NY Times's wedding section is. It is yet another example of the TImes's cringingly embarassing bourgeois establishmentarianism. Presumably the couples pay to get their announcement placed. No one except for the rich and connected - by job, family, whatever - get announced. Its all about money, money, money. I estimate none of the announcements are for couples making less than six figures each. So its a perfect compendium of status seekers who want to trumpet their gilt-edged couplings to the world. What a waste of dead trees. And yes, tons of the names are Jewish but that doesn't make mentioning them ant-semitic.

Most perverse about the Wedlock Section are the mechanisms that sanitize the institution of marriage, how left in are the demotic and the common tansy, and omitted are the otherworldly.

Surely, defenders (or mostly profiteers) will rise up to pathologize or attribute one malady or another to unions that were left unsought or denied from being published. But these hypochondriacs are so generic in their formulaic usage of inferior tools that all the unlisted have to do, is build imperviousness and near-immunity to such malignant characterizations as stigmatizers fish out; while the select among the listed who understand how the exigencies of immediacy trump expectations for posterity, might also want to opt out of secondary assemblies as this clever site.

Because many of the people who go to these "good, tough schools" got there as the end result of a lifetime filled with privilege. They went to Dalton (or some similar preparatory school with a tuition greater than that of some universities).

Those people also knew they had a trust fund (one immune to the shocks of a "recession") and that when they finished going to the "good, tough school" they would not have to take a penny in loans to get through.

They also knew that when they finished with their "good, tough school" their parents' connections in social, business and religious circles would guarantee them an excellent career path.

The reason it's considered "snooty" is because it's the same sort of bullshit nonsense that has people with minimal mountaineering skills climbing Mt. Everest. They whip out their checkbook, and the Sherpas practically carry them up the mountain, and then they spend the next 50 years telling everyone how they "climbed" Mt. Everest.

Try getting all high-horse with me sweetheart after you actually did it on your own goddamn nickel and without mummy and daddy's credit cards in your pocket. Because anyone who did knows exactly what's wrong with the New York Times' bullshit ego-stroke wedding section.

God, can't you ever step back and look at the world as something other than something you can wipe your ass on for you own aggrandizement?

The leisure sections give hope to the industrious and dissuade the slothful from non-participation in active labor. Especially marital announcements, without them the only human relationships showcased, will disproportionately misrepresent actual social bonds, ex. the shopper and the salesperson, the viewer and the screen, the crook and his overseer. BTW, some of the best future lawyers will be Northeastern grads, and dropping the H-bomb to impress is an eye-roller.

To balance the Wedding section, the NY Times needs to start a "Divorce" page, detailing the thousands of gory separations, including who their lawyers are, grounds for divorce, co-respondents, and who gets what. Of course, that won't happen, since the Times wants to fluff their wedding-related advertisers: party rentals, caterers, fashion, entertainment, travel, gift merchandisers, registry ... it is big business. And where's there's a product to be flogged, the Times is there with "lifestyle" coverage.

There's a slapstick quality to the way this aliased blog filters out the picketing specialized noise in the media lattice. Too bad they haven't monetized. It be very interesting to follow the profiled vanity set as they put their money where they're told, covet whom they're told, and see how closely they track with benchmarks designated for their queue, and how diligently they avoid the booby traps laid out along their venture.

Frankly, having checked out this collective's blog, it is way picky and overkill.Come on guys, cut Times writers some slack. They are bleak or burntout by gadflies of backlash. Stop pinpointing their off-the-cuff prejudices (among other disqualifiers) and do defuse rants that translate the rhetorical execrable; we're not supposed to reorient those who want nothing but to rue over naturally justifiable victimhood.

@ 8:09 AM you should know better, as despicable as it sounds, the divorce industry is tapped into by entrepreneurs: distressed adults with earned fortune, besides needing lawyers and counsellors, want levitation time, self-validating pathologies, pills to aid the denunciation of the past, and items that steer resurrection anew. But then again, whatever you say, preying on the amputated and the displaced in not what gentlemen do in full view, and another point, targetting miserable woman within a marriage is more lucrative though a crowded market.

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